


Home Is the Hunter

by Aliset, GhostCwtch



Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Captain America Reverse Big Bang 2019, Found Family, Gen, It's Not Paranoia If They're Really Out To Get You, Post-Avengers (2012), Steve Rogers Needs a Hug, Steve Rogers vs. the 21st Century, Team as Family, do not copy to another site
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-07
Updated: 2019-06-12
Packaged: 2020-04-12 01:06:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 17,528
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19121464
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aliset/pseuds/Aliset, https://archiveofourown.org/users/GhostCwtch/pseuds/GhostCwtch
Summary: Steve Rogers has been in the 21st century ten days when he fights the Chitauri in the Battle of New York. He doesn't know a lot about this strange new time, but he knows he doesn't trust SHIELD.Clint and Natasha have a mission of their own. Their mission?  Isn't what SHIELD thinks it is.(Or, the AU where Steve starts learning how to live in the 21st century with the aid of the most unlikeliest of allies.)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> My thanks to Escapologist and Girlbookwrm for beta-reading above and beyond the call, making this story far better than it would have been otherwise. And special thanks to GhostCwtch for her art and the story prompt that came from it.

 

 

Steve leaned against the closed door of his apartment and walked to the uncomfortable couch---chosen, like almost everything else in this apartment, by SHIELD---to take his shoes off. He’d come from one of the mandatory debriefings SHIELD insisted he attend---this one had been on things he couldn’t say anymore. Some of those had surprised him--- _negro_ had certainly been a more polite term in his era than what black people ( _African-Americans_ , he reminded himself) had often been called. And women weren’t _girls_ or _dames,_ and _LGBTQIA_ and _gay_ had thankfully replaced _fairy, invert, queer._

But when he’d asked for books about these social changes and how they’d come about…the appraising look of his trainers had grown uncomfortable and stiff. Later, they’d promised. Later. Steve had wanted to ask how much later he was going to have to wait---another seventy years, perhaps?---but hadn’t.

One of SHIELD’s first actions, after they had retrieved him from the isolated cabin, was to install him in this small apartment in Brooklyn.  Even that had felt like the worst kind of manipulation--- _here you are Captain Rogers, here’s an empty apartment in a city you no longer recognize_ \--- but at least he’d been allowed to live somewhere that wasn’t the SHIELD barracks or, worse, that cold and isolated cabin.

Steve hadn’t been born in the _1820s_ ; he was well aware that SHIELD had an agenda. It was clear enough when they talked to him; they spoke of “Erskine’s great gift to the nation” and what it would mean to the country to have him alive and allied with SHIELD and all the “greater good” his presence represented…but Steve had been born at end of one war and sacrificed himself to end another and he was _done_. He was also not nearly dumb enough to tell them so outright, not until he got his bearings in this strange new century.

And there were other things about SHIELD that made Steve uneasy. His selection of reading materials at the cabin had been…decidedly one-sided, as if they’d forgotten (or chosen to ignore, or never knew) that Steve Rogers had marched for workers’ rights, that he’d grown up the sickly son of immigrants in a queer neighborhood, that he’d survived (barely, it was true) the Great Depression, that he’d voted for FDR and the New Deal. If what he was given to read was accurate, the country he thought he’d died for had changed, and in many ways, not for the better. _Hiroshima. Nagasaki. All the wars that had followed his war_. But the bias was clear: if the US had invaded other countries, it was for the greater good, and so on. That was enough to stick in his craw, but the patronizing responses from SHIELD agents when he asked them to explain or asked for more comprehensive reading materials was worse. He hadn’t been dumb, even before the serum, and to be treated as if he was incapable…

Steve had never been a man who thrived on half the information. But the picture he was putting together wasn’t one that led him to trust SHIELD---from that farce of a hospital room onward, there was something off about the organization, and while he didn’t know much about this new century, he knew enough to keep SHIELD at arm’s length, as much as he could.

But SHIELD was always around, always listening. He knew his apartment was bugged because he could hear them (something he hadn’t made clear to anyone at SHIELD,) and he’d also considered the possibility that at least a few of his neighbors might also be SHIELD agents. So he was wary of those who were too friendly, but he’d at least made the acquaintance of the others. There was the Fred the pot grower upstairs, Eliza, the lady across the hall who made the most amazing lasagna, Agatha who was half deaf and listened to opera until the wee hours of the morning, and then there was Dave.

It had taken Steve about five minutes to clock Dave as being both paranoid about the government and full of ideas Steve might use to get himself some freedom from SHIELD’s eternal surveillance. Plus, he liked Dave---the man was a serious chess player. He appreciated that Dave overlooked his awkwardness and the odd gaps in his knowledge and the nightmares he must have heard. If Dave was paranoid about the government… well, Steve had woken up into a cheap facsimile of a 1940s hospital room, then been escorted to an isolated cabin “for his own good.” Dave might be wrong about some things, but Steve had a bugged apartment to prove he wasn’t wrong about all of it.

“So you don’t know what a burner phone is?” Dave asked, a concerned squint under bushy eyebrows. “I seen that fancy phone you got, probably trackable six ways to Friday.”

“The fancy phone” was SHIELD issue. Steve hadn’t so much as turned it on since it had shown up in his apartment along with boxes of other things Steve was presumed to need and which also remained unopened. “No, sir,” Steve answered, gazing at the pieces on the chessboard. His queen was in serious danger. “Never heard of a burner phone. I was…stationed overseas, then I was in the hospital for a long time. I was discharged, then I came home.”

It wasn’t exactly the cover story SHIELD had given him, but it was basically the truth and it suited him better anyway.  Dave studied him. “Veteran, were ya?”

Steve nodded. “Don’t really want to talk about it.”

Dave advanced his knight. “Fair enough. Might want to look to your queen, though.”

Steve won that game, but not by much.

***

“There a reason you don’t want to play chess in your apartment?” Dave asked one night not long after Steve had moved in. He was making a big pot of stew, something akin to the hearty meals Steve recalled from his own tenement days, before the Crash. Back when his mam could still afford meat, that was. Another part of his mind was hoping---because the stew was freshly made---that it wouldn’t taste like the artificial sharpness of so much of the food he’d eaten since he’d been defrosted. Nothing tasted right, not the bread, not the milk, not even the damned bananas. It was enough to work a guy into a deeper funk and Steve tried to shake himself out of it.

“I have bugs in my apartment,” Steve confessed.

“Call the exterminator, then. But call the manager first.”

“No, not that kind of bug,” Steve told him. “Listening devices.”

“You think people are listening to you?” Dave asked quietly. He stopped stirring the stew and propped the ladle on one side so it wouldn’t slide into the pot. “What kind of trouble you in, boy?”

_I was frozen for seventy years,_ Steve fantasized about saying, but didn’t. “The kind where I’d like to keep my life to myself,” he said instead.

“The government ain’t always fond of that notion,” Dave put in, stirring the stew again. “Do you know where the bugs are?”

Steve nodded. “I can hear them. But if I take them out, they’ll just put new ones in. I don’t sleep anyway, but---” His mouth closed abruptly. He hadn’t meant to say that.

The stew continued gurgling on the stove. Dave turned the burner off and faced Steve squarely. “First thing, boy. You got to sleep. I don’t care what your trouble is or was, you have to.”

He’d been out of SHIELD’s custody for five days, out of the ice for nine days total. He hadn’t slept more than a few hours in all that stretch of time. “I can’t,” he finally said.

“We’re gonna eat first,” Dave went on, as if he hadn’t spoken, “and then you’re gonna catch some sleep on my couch.” He gestured to the air around them. “You hear anything?”

Steve listened. There was the sound of the fan, the radio Dave kept on, low in the background, but no omnipresent hum that made his teeth ache. No bugs. “That’s right,” Dave said. “They haven’t bugged my place. Probably think I’m a little nuts, and I’m fine with them thinking that. But you can sleep here for a few hours and get your head straight, and then we’re gonna talk.”

***

And talk they did. Dave provided an education more solid than the one SHIELD had tried to provide. Steve learned about the concept of “the grid,” about how to get off it, about burner phones, about the cameras that were literally everywhere, about using cash only and never using his debit card. And while many of Dave’s theories about the government were heavily drenched in paranoia---his sincere belief in an an omnipresent, omniscient “them” that was out to track ordinary citizens through black helicopters and contrails---there were more than a few glimmers of truth in what he said too.

“Check your clothes too,” Dave said late one night as Steve was preparing to head back to his own apartment across the hall.

“Why?” Steve asked.

“From what you’ve told me---and what you haven’t---they seem to want to keep an eye on you. Heard a few theories online about trackers small enough to fit inside clothing.”

Steve found the first tracker that night, a small metallic chip buried deep in the collar seam of one of the shirts he wore to bed. He didn’t dare cut it out---not without risking alerting SHIELD that he was onto them. He sat down heavily on his bed and made a mental note to start buying clothing that SHIELD hadn’t provided. Until he could, they were able to track his every movement.

But knowledge was power, was _resistance_. He knew what SHIELD was doing now, knew the lengths it was willing to go to make sure he stayed under their control and now? Steve had to think of how to slip their net.

***

Dave found him on the front step of their apartment building early one morning. Steve hadn’t expected anyone to notice he’d left the apartment—it was just past dawn and there was still a hint of nighttime’s chill in the air, but he couldn’t face going back into his apartment, not to face the memories of ice and water and drowning. So he went outside and wished devoutly for a cigarette.

“Hey,” Dave called softly.  “You up too?”

In his hand he held an unlit cigarette. Steve took it from him and lit it with Dave’s lighter. The smoke reminded him of a simpler, more dangerous time---wartime cigarettes around a campfire with the Howlies. For a moment, he could almost smell them, the ever-present reek of unwashed bodies and mud and cordite and gunpowder. “Thanks,” Steve managed around a sudden jagged lump in his throat. It had been nine days and seventy years ago.

“Still not sleeping much?” Dave asked.

It was on the tip of his tongue to insist he was _fine, just fine, thank you_ but the words wouldn’t form. “Not really,” he said instead. “You know.”

Dave shrugged. “Probably I don’t, not really,” he said dryly, “and you probably don’t want to tell me, either. That’s fine, by the way---we all have our secrets. But a big fella like yourself must work out some, right?”

Steve shook the ash off his cigarette, puzzled by the apparent non sequitur. “Yeah. I guess. Why?”

“There’s a gym down the street, run by an old friend of mine. Sometimes exercise helps.”

SHIELD’s gym had been all bright lights and mirrors and staring eyes; Steve had fled as soon as he could. “I don’t need nothin’ fancy.”

Dave laughed, a warming sound. “If you picture ‘fancy,’ this gym is the farthest thing from it. You ask Mario, he’ll tell you the place should be condemned and I don’t think he’s wrong. Place opens up in a few hours. Tell Mario I sent ya, then come back and tell me what you think.”

And the gym had turned out to be exactly what he needed. Peeling paint and faded posters and all, the gym and its equipment wasn’t fancy but best of all (and strangest, to Steve) was that Mario had taken one look at him, simply said, “Dave sent you?” and tossed him a set of keys. “Lock up when you’re done,” Mario said. “Dave says you’re good for it.”

“I…don’t understand,” Steve said, mystified. “You don’t know me.”

“You tellin’ me I shouldn’t trust you?” Mario asked.

Steve felt his ears redden. “I…no, that’s not what I meant.”

Mario gave a soft huff of laughter. “I figured. Look, Dave does this every so often. He ain’t ever been wrong.”

“Does what?” Steve asked.

Mario folded his arms. “He’s got a…good sense about people. Finds the lost ones, helps them stand up again. Don’t know how he does it but he’s sent some of them to me over the years.”

Steve nodded. “Only thing I ask,” Mario went on. “If you make a mess, clean it up. And don’t go making copies of that key. Now, I have to go open up the bakery, so…you have yourself a good workout there.”

The next night, seized by a sudden anger ( _why me why this I wasn’t supposed to be here and I can’t go back and I can’t go home)_ and missing Peggy and Bucky and his friends and his _life_ down to the marrow of his bones, Steve fled to the gym. He didn’t pay attention to the strength of his jabs against the worn punching bags and only realized he’d completely destroyed one when he heard the spray of sand hit the worn wooden floors. He spared a glance for the other punching bags, all of them patched and worn, and wondered where Mario kept his broom.

Steve was just hanging the next bag on its hook when he heard the creak of the door opening. He turned to see Nick Fury watching him, a file in his hands, and felt again the inescapable pressure of the ice enclosing him, drowning him. “Trying to get me back into the world?” he managed when Fury finished his speech.

“Trying to save it,” Fury said. “It’s called the Tesseract. Howard Stark found it when he was looking for you…”

 


	2. Chapter 2

Chapter 2

 

After Loki had been sent back to Asgard with the Tesseract, after the remains of the space whales and alien ichor littering the city had begun to get cleaned up or otherwise disposed of, after Steve Rogers had shaken Tony Stark’s hand and left, Natasha Romanoff received a letter.

As did Clint.

She wasn’t sure what disturbed her more. Natasha had no correspondents who knew this address—her safe house in Brooklyn was off SHIELD’s records for a reason. And Clint…who knew about Clint these days? SHIELD wouldn’t let him on site to attend Phil’s memorial and Natasha feared to let Clint out of her sight because of what SHIELD might do to him without any witnesses around. So he--- _they_ \---were essentially in limbo until the powers that be decided what they wanted Clint to do while he was persona non grata.

It was, and was intended to be, isolating. So she’d camped out, more or less, on Clint’s rickety sofa in BedStuy, standing watch. She brewed a cup of tea and read her letter again and again.

_“Bozhe moi,”_ she muttered.

***

“That’s from…Phil?” Clint asked hours later, after he emerged from the bedroom. He sounded much like he had before Loki, but it was an act. His hands, the steady hands of an archer, shook slightly, symbols of a turmoil he didn’t feel the need to hide from her.

Natasha nodded. “Part of his will, I guess. Revised after Captain America was found and defrosted. It came in my mail this morning, to be delivered in case of…” she swallowed. “You got one too.”

“And Phil wanted us to….”

“Help him, if he wasn’t there to do the job himself. Phil was…worried.”

That was an absolute understatement. Phil hid--- _had hid,_ she reminded herself---his perpetual worrying under a veneer of extreme calm; it was part of what had made him such an excellent handler. But he had been concerned enough to put his worries in a letter to them both, and ask them to do what he couldn’t---help Steve Rogers adjust to the 21st century.

The letter had been coded, of course; Phil was no fool. But decoded, the letter was blunt and to the point. Written over a period of a few days, Phil had noted that Steve Rogers was depressed, not adjusting well to his new reality, lost and alone and grieving. And nobody (including Fury) seemed to understand or appreciate how tenuous the man’s mental state really was. But Phil---the original Captain America fanboy---had seen and understood.

_Don’t trust SHIELD’s analysis of how well he’s doing._

Natasha tapped the empty envelope against her lips, unnerved at how that much of that last sentence had been obliterated until _Don’t trust SHIELD_ remained. Well, she already didn’t, but for Phil of all people to be suspicious? That was a good bit more telling. She had no idea why Phil had asked for her help on this---she wasn’t known for being warm or friendly, and Clint was her only real friend. She read further:

_I thought you might understand because you’ve been in almost his exact situation._

_Foolish, weak sentimentality,_ her teachers in the Red Room would have said. Except Phil hadn’t been wrong either. She had defected at 16, but it had been Clint and Phil who had taught her to be a person. Phil had been a caretaker, the kind of guy who would have been ideal for the job of shepherding a traumatized veteran through the 21st century.

But her? What possible skills did she have?

_I know what you’re thinking. That you can’t help him, that you don’t have the tools. He needs you. Your perspective. You won’t let him down._

Natasha placed the letter on the coffee table and let out one dry, harsh sob.

_Dammit, Phil._

***

Clint had read his letter with somewhat more calm. He was not a particularly fast reader, but he was thorough. Once he finished, he cracked open a beer, heedless of the hour, and handed her one too. “So we should find him. Cap, I mean. Because Phil wants us to.”

She noted the present tense with a pang she shoved aside. “SHIELD has trackers on him. Shouldn’t be hard---”

“I don’t want to find him like that, Nat,” Clint finally said. “We use SHIELD technology to find him, he’ll never trust either of us again.” He leaned back against the stained, comfortable couch. “Think about it from his perspective for a bit. He was out of the ice ten days before Fury called him back into the fight. Ten days where he was basically shoved into a cabin in the middle of the woods, then into an empty apartment with the service records of his dead friends, and left completely alone. If SHIELD didn’t want him depressed and isolated, they’re going about it all the wrong way. Phil… saw that too.”

“How did you---” Natasha asked, astonished. She hadn’t been privy to even one third of that information and she was supposed to have been Steve Rogers’ handler once he joined the Avengers Initiative.

Clint waved the letter. “Phil. He gave me a detailed description of what he thought SHIELD was doing. Did you know they overruled his recommendations?”

“Because he was a fan of Captain America?” she asked.

“Because he wanted him kept off the Avengers Initiative. Phil was an Army Ranger. You think he didn’t know what PTSD looked like? But nobody listened. And when the Chitauri invaded…”

She nodded. “There wasn’t really an option. He had to come back in the fight.”

“That’s what Fury thought. Phil disagreed.” Clint frowned. “We need to find him, Nat. Man deserves more than to be shoved into another fight for lack of an alternative.”

“SHIELD isn’t going to like it if you disappear,” Natasha said, which was nothing more than the truth. “If you don’t want SHIELD following you while we’re looking for Captain America, then we’ll have to come up with a story to keep SHIELD off our tails.”

Clint looked around at his cluttered apartment. “My mental health?” And it wasn’t even entirely a lie---SHIELD had made it clear that Clint was on the outside now, and that might not even change even if he was reinstated. For Clint, who had made a life at SHIELD, it was devastating.

She smiled. “All my covers aren’t blown just yet. Let’s go find him.”

***

Clint flipped through the thick file on his end table. It was SHIELD’s analysis (“professional analysis,” Natasha had said archly, which told him enough) of Steve Rogers. “And how did you get this?” he asked. Clint’s own clearance level was---had been---pretty high, but this had to be level 10. Nothing was redacted. At all. And reading it, Clint wondered how anyone would expect Steve Rogers to be someone’s mascot or yes man---the man had apparently never met an order he would obey without question. And if he hadn’t been so damned good at his job, probably would have been court-martialed decades before. Colonel Phillips’ own reports---missing from the dossier Clint had seen---had said as much, even though there had also been an undercurrent of reluctant (and annoyed) admiration.

“I’m his handler,” she told him. “And, Fury.”

“Fury gave this to you?”

“I’m supposed to be keeping an eye on him,” she said. “Can’t do that with half the information.”

Clint folded his arms, studying her. “Fury wants you to bring him back, convince him to join SHIELD.”

Natasha shrugged. “He does. Though that gives us an excellent cover to track him down. Besides, you know Fury’s world. We’re all either assets or victims to him. I don’t think he really wants to see Steve Rogers be a victim.”

“I don’t think Fury much cares either way,” Clint retorted bluntly. He scrubbed at his face, noting he needed a shave. “He sees a disaffected soldier and wants to put him back in the fight, make him feel of use again. Might not be a bad idea for any other soldier but this one. The man at least deserves an actual choice at what to do.”

Natasha nodded slowly, though Clint could tell that she---who had never had a choice about anything she did until she defected---might be struggling with the notion. “So, his apartment?”

Clint nodded. “His apartment.”

***

His apartment, Natasha found, was vacant, not merely empty. Though perhaps it had always looked that way; it certainly lacked any sign, save the lone cup and plate drying on the counter, that anyone lived here. She quickly silenced the bugs (her later report to SHIELD---because she would have to explain her presence when Captain Rogers was officially on leave---would blame this on a “mechanical malfunction”) and saw the spotless bedroom, the clean, unwrinkled bedding as a sign, and not a good one. Steve Rogers may have lived here, but he hadn’t been alive here. There were no signs of someone who was sleeping well enough or long enough to rumple a pillow. No pictures on the wall, nothing out of order the way a lived-in place would get.

There was a coffee table with a new, pristine, laptop. Expensive, and to a man ten days out of the 1940s, almost certainly useless. Stacked next to the laptop was the service records of his friends, the people he’d fought with and died for all those years ago. One of them was missing---not Peggy Carter’s, now retired and living peacefully in an English cottage by the sea, but James Morita’s. James Morita who---if she remembered correctly, and she was sure she did---was retired and living in San Diego with his daughter and granddaughter.

She checked the closet in the bedroom. There was a wardrobe of plaid button-downs--- really, who had bought those for him?---some pants, but everything was pretty much just as it had been when this apartment had first been provisioned. Shoes were lined up neatly. But _all_ of his shoes. _All_ of his SHIELD-provided clothing was in the closet.

So Steve Rogers was most likely headed for San Diego, and he was absolutely aware that SHIELD was tracking his every move. _The greatest strategic mind of his generation,_ one analysis of him had concluded. Natasha recalled scoffing slightly at that---what did that even _mean,_ in the context of someone who was freshly emerged from the ice after seventy years? Then he’d seen through both the hospital room mock-up and the deliberately wrong clothing of the “nurse” in under ten seconds.

She chuckled slightly in reluctant admiration. She had little professional use for Captain America, but Steve Rogers was beginning to be someone she’d like to know better.

***

“So what’s the story on James Morita?” Clint asked as they packed up what supplies---clothing, spare identities and the like---they’d need from a storage unit rented in his ex-wife’s name. He’d dropped out of school in the 10th grade, gotten his GED before enlisting in the Army, but there were still a few glaring gaps in his education and history was one of them.

“Rogers took the file with him,” Natasha answered. “But Morita served in Congress for many years and was an early leader, along with Gabe Jones, in the civil rights movement. He was married---his wife died several years ago---and they had four children, one of whom died in Vietnam. He now lives in San Diego with his daughter Alice and his granddaughter Stephanie.”

Clint shouldn’t have been surprised that she knew that much, but he always was. Her knack for obtaining information she wasn’t supposed to have was unparalleled, in his experience. “Stephanie?” he asked.

Natasha smiled. “There’s been a Stephanie, a Steve, a James, or a Jamie in every child or grandchild of the Howling Commandos. They… never forgot.”

“Huh,” Clint said. “Well, so we’re assuming that’s Rogers’ end stop. You think he’ll stop anywhere in between?”

“He left his bike behind.”

“The one with all the SHIELD trackers?”

“Yes,” Natasha said. “So not only do we not know all the places he’s going, we don’t know how he’s getting there. And he’s got at least a day’s head start on us. Not much more, because the dishes in his kitchen were still damp.”

“Well, let’s think of this like a man from the 1940s would,” Clint began, feeling wholly out of his depth. Target analysis had been Phil’s thing, not his. But he’d learned what he could. “Neighbors?”

“None who would talk. One of them spotted me as being from ‘the government’ almost immediately. Not sure how.”

That was something. Natasha was a social chameleon and could have gotten anyone to talk. But not these people. “Did he take his wallet?”

Natasha nodded. “Yes. Credit and debit cards haven’t been used. There was a cash withdrawal made just after Thor took Loki back to Asgard, but nothing since.”

“Enough to buy a car?”

“I’m not sure. I had to flash a badge to get a teller to tell me that much but anything more, she said I had to bring a subpoena with me. But since I doubt Rogers is going to run around naked, I’ll assume there was a significant cash withdrawal.”

Her reasoning was sound. “All right,” Clint said. “So he’s cash only. Man growing up in the Great Depression wouldn’t travel any other way.”

“Then he’ll stick to the shadier hotels. They’re cheaper, for one, and a man paying cash for a room at a high-end place would be noticed, but not one in the slums.”

Clint thought of the sheer number of dives and rent-by-the-hour places between New York City and San Diego and held back a curse. Wasn’t like he could blame Rogers—or Phil, for that matter---for not trusting SHIELD. Just as he was getting bogged down in the sheer number of possibilities of searching through all of those, Natasha went on. “I wrote up a tracking algorithm similar to the one we used when we were tracking you and…” She must have seen something in his face because her eyes softened somewhat. “It’s off the record. SHIELD doesn’t know I created it. If he’s seen on social media, or his picture is taken, we’ll find him. A man like Rogers will be noticed.”

“I don’t think he took the uniform with him,” Clint pointed out. “And the mask covers half his face.”

“He’ll still be recognized,” Natasha insisted. “If only because he looks ‘just like’ Captain America.”

***

It took three days for the first hit to come in. Tagged on Instagram as a #celebritylookalike, it was a picture taken by a college student who’d blown a tire on her way to visit her grandmother in the hospital. “This guy who looks just like Steve Rogers helped me change my tire!” she’d captioned. “Thanks, Grant!”

“Grant?” Clint asked.

“His middle name,” Natasha replied. “Look, she got a picture of him standing next to his car’s license plate. There’s enough for a partial plate.”

Clint mulled that one over. “I think he wants to be found. Maybe.”

“Because he didn’t say no to the picture?” Natasha asked.

Clint nodded. “He’s smart enough to ditch all of SHIELD’s surveillance, smart enough to use cash only, lucky enough to somehow avoid all the cameras between here and there, and yet dumb enough to let college student take his picture and post it to social media? It doesn’t track, otherwise.”

“I doubt SHIELD thought of educating him about social media,” Natasha observed dryly. She made the picture larger. “Look at his face.”

Rogers was smiling, but there was something off about it---it didn’t match up with the exhaustion that he probably thought he was hiding. He was wearing a public face, the one that had appeared on a thousand posters, but it wasn’t…right. “He’s not sleeping much,” Clint observed.

“His records say he doesn’t have to sleep much but it doesn’t mean he doesn’t have to sleep at all,” Natasha confirmed. “This picture was taken just outside of the Grand Canyon.”


	3. Chapter 3

Chapter 3

 

They reached Steve’s last known location a day after the picture hit social media. Monitoring the comments on her personal phone, Natasha was relieved to see that nobody (except for some conspiracy theorists whose comments were ridiculed and quickly voted down) seemed to think that the man who’d helped the college student change her tire was really Captain America. Which would make SHIELD happy, she thought; they wanted anonymity for all the Avengers.

But the more she thought of it, and read over his file and considered what conclusions could be drawn from all of it, the more she became certain that Steve Rogers was not planning to join SHIELD at all. SHIELD hadn’t done anything to earn his trust; her initial interviews of Steve’s neighbors had proven that much. The ones who were undercover SHIELD agents reported that they hadn’t been able to get close to him at all, thanks to both Rogers’s other neighbors and Rogers himself, who---as Clint put it---had a more finely tuned bullshit detector than anyone had realized. He had dodged the SHIELD agents entirely and while the surveillance devices inside his apartment remained active, he had given them surprisingly little (besides the expected nightmares) to report on.

One agent had come to the surprising conclusion that Rogers had known the devices were there all along. And had chosen—for whatever reason---to not remove them. “And he plays chess with that guy across the hall a lot,” the agent had reported, mystified. “Never turns on his TV or uses his computer, but plays chess.”

It made no sense to the agent, but made perfect sense to Natasha Romanoff. She’d thanked the agent and decided not to add that tidbit to his file. Captain America was an open book, but maybe Steve Rogers didn’t have to be.

***

They found him at the North Rim of the Grand Canyon at a campsite surrounded by trees at the end of a long narrow path. She and Clint had made camp there too, relying on the families near them to provide adequate camouflage. Rogers had bought an older white truck with a camper shell, dusty and banged up a little, and had neatly blended in with the other campers. He’d made his reservation under the name “S. Grant” and it was so obvious it made her wince a little. Did the man know _nothing_ of subtlety?

She and Clint had set up camp further down the path---close enough to observe, not close enough to be seen. Or so she hoped. Rogers was this strange combination of naivety and world-weary knowledge and Natasha found she couldn’t really predict what he might do in any circumstance. Which was SHIELD’s folly, she realized abruptly. They’d packaged Captain America into a neat dossier born of wartime stories and national mythology, but they hadn’t really put much thought into _Steve Rogers._

“I got us some food,” Clint announced. “Found a local butcher. We got hamburger and steaks and---”

“Please tell me a salad of some kind is involved,” Natasha said with a grin.

Somehow, he’d found or made a Greek salad and handed it to her with a flourish. He started the grill. “I left the bag of charcoal inside the tent---would you bring it out?”

What she hadn’t counted on was the dark, still presence waiting for them in their tent, or the knife that was at her throat faster than she’d thought he could move. “You’ve been following me,” Steve Rogers hissed---for no doubt, this wasn’t Captain America, but the World War II soldier--- “Why?”

Clint rushed in with an arrow aimed, not at Rogers’ throat, but at his side---the arrow was tipped with enough paralytic to take down the Hulk if necessary. “We just want to talk,” Natasha managed, holding out her hands in what she hoped was a peaceable gesture.

The arm at her neck relaxed and released her. “So talk. But make it quick. I ain’t plannin’ to come back soon.”

Clint placed his arrow back in its case. “We’re not here to bring you back, Captain.”

The Brooklyn accent was thick in his voice and in other contexts, Natasha thought she’d have found it amusing. “Then why are you here? You work for Fury.”

Clint laughed a little, though there was no humor in it. “Captain, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but SHIELD isn’t real fond of me right now.”

“And they’ve never been fond of me,” Natasha said dryly. At Clint’s look, she shrugged. “What? You know it’s true.”

Something in Rogers’ tense, wary posture relaxed a bit. “I’m sorry about Coulson’s death. He was a good man.”

“The very best,” Clint said, his face pulling into lines of guilt and sorrow. “That’s…kind of why we’re here. But…look, have you eaten?”

Rogers was a bit thinner, and slightly pale. He might have been eating, but not enough for his metabolism, Natasha deduced. “I had a sandwich just before I arrived,” Rogers said. “Why?”

“Let’s all put away the pointy things so we can have a decent conversation,” Clint said mildly. 

Unexpectedly, Rogers snorted. “Says the man with a poison-tipped arrow.”

“Paralytic, not poisoned,” Clint corrected mildly. “And you had a knife. I didn’t know you used knives.”

Some expression Natasha couldn’t name flitted across Rogers’ face and was gone. “A friend taught me during the war. Slightly less conspicuous than the shield.”

“Speaking of conspicuous,” Natasha said, aiming for gently chiding, “you let some college girl take your picture. Social media, Rogers, have you heard of it?”

He might have flushed; in the dim light, it was hard to tell. “It’s Steve. Dave said you might be able to track me that way.”

“So…you _knew?_ ” Natasha asked, startled.

“I suspected,” Rogers--- _Steve_ \---answered. “I figured SHIELD would send someone out eventually and I guessed it would be one of you.” He breathed out. “Look, if you’re here, you know where I’m headed. I get to San Diego, there’s not much further west I can go and I don’t want to be…chased all the way there. So if you got somethin’ to say to me, best say it here.”

“Food first,” Clint insisted. “Then we’ll talk.”

***

“So why the Grand Canyon?” Natasha asked, spearing a forkful of salad.

Steve was on his third or fourth burger. She thought of the notation in his file--- _increased metabolism_ \---and wondered how often he’d been on the verge of starving since they’d defrosted him. It couldn’t be easy to eat as much as he surely needed to. “I…I had a friend, died in the war. We always talked about coming here once we got home.”

Natasha kept her face still. She’d read the accounts of his unit and knew that only one man in his unit had died, and that not too long after, Rogers himself had piloted the _Valkyrie_ to what he’d assumed would be her watery grave and his own. There were some obvious conclusions there, but she decided to just absorb the information without analysis. Steve Rogers had spent a good chunk of the 21st century being analyzed to the nth degree by SHIELD; he probably was tired of it. Instead, she looked around at the high canyon walls tinted a thousand colors by the setting sun. “It’s a beautiful place. Kind of takes your breath away.”

Steve nodded. “We talked about the Grand Canyon when we were kids. Always thought I’d come here and paint it, but I wouldn’t have been able to see the colors.” He grinned, taking some of the weariness off his face. “I was color-blind, before…” He gestured at himself, tall and broad-shouldered and by all appearances, absolutely healthy. “So, you’re not here on SHIELD’s behalf? Why are you here?”

“We each received a letter,” Natasha began quietly. She placed a small device she’d borrowed from her SHIELD kit and placed it on the picnic table. All conversation around them was instantly muted. “From Coulson. They… he began to write them a day or so after you were recovered from the Valkyrie.”

Steve’s eyebrows drew together. “He started to write letters…about me…when SHIELD was still thinking I was a well-preserved corpse?”

Clint nodded. “Phil… _Coulson_ was an optimist. Seems like he thought you might survive and he was…concerned.”

“Concerned about what?” It was an innocent question but nobody who’d been through what Steve Rogers had seen could possibly be that innocent, Natasha mused.

“SHIELD,” Clint answered. He took her hand, one of the few men who could without her instincts kicking in. “And Phil didn’t do so easily. For many of us, Coulson _was_ SHIELD. He recruited me, and I don’t know how many others. For him to have had the kind of doubts he expressed in our letters…” He swallowed. “Captain, he wanted us to reach out to you. To help you, if you wanted it. And even if Coulson hadn’t asked? I still would have. You trusted me when you had no goddamned reason to, and that’s worth a lot to me.”

“Nobody asks to get brainwashed by a hostile alien in league with a more hostile and advanced alien army,” Steve replied dryly. “Never thought I’d hear myself saying those words. But I wasn’t wrong to trust you.” He placed his hands---large, but still recognizably artist’s hands---flat on the worn wood of the picnic table. “So I don’t need to read the letters, but what kind of help are we talking about here?”

Natasha folded her arms. “In a week or so, SHIELD will expect you to return. They will make a plea for you to join them. They’ll play to your patriotism, your sense of duty. They’ll bring up all the good you could do, working for SHIELD.”

“Last time I heard a version of this speech, I ended up wearing tights,” Steve grumbled but with a glimmer of humor. “Go on.”

“Coulson didn’t want you on the Avengers,” Natasha continued. “He was overruled.”

“Why?”

She didn’t know how she’d expected him to react, but it wasn’t that—the cool, calm inquiry instead of flaring into anger, defensiveness, or self-righteousness. “Coulson thought that---far from helping you acclimate to this time---SHIELD was isolating you, trying to make you more dependent on the organization. He thought you had…” and here she paused, realizing she was walking through a literal minefield… “In your era they called it ‘shell-shock.’ They call it PTSD now: post-traumatic stress disorder.”

If he was going to grow angry, insist that he was _just fine,_ it would be here, she thought. Patton had slapped a soldier hospitalized for shell-shock during Steve’s war. And given his era, the time he’d grown to manhood, she wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d stormed off, angry. But that wasn’t what happened. “What if I did? Would you have me put into an asylum?” 

Natasha blinked. She’d done some very basic research about his era and what often passed for psychiatric care. Even for a Red Room graduate, much of it was absolutely horrifying. “That’s…no. That’s not how we do things now.”

Steve was quiet for a while, and his eyes were dark and mistrusting. “So what do you people do about this PTSD?” he asked eventually.

“You talk to a therapist---someone not from SHIELD,” Clint put in. “Your basic story---a soldier, missing and presumed dead, trying to reintegrate back into civilian life—isn’t really that unusual. And you go from there.” He paused. “Coulson was afraid from the outset that you wouldn’t get a chance to heal, and he was right. SHIELD could have done so much more for you, to reintegrate you but they didn’t. Instead, they pulled you back into active combat…what, ten days out of the ice?”

“Fury messed with the Tesseract,” Steve almost snarled and oh, _there_ was the anger she’d been expecting. “Told him he should have left it in the ocean. No good ever comes of using it, for any reason.”

She recalled his fierce glare at the Tesseract when Thor and Loki had departed and thought she understood a bit better now. He’d died to prevent it being used for evil, only to reawaken to find not only that his world was at war because of the Tesseract but also that SHIELD---and Nick Fury---had planned to use it to make weapons. “So what you have to figure out now is, where do you want to go from here?”

Steve shrugged. “Right now, I just want to get to California and see my old friend before he passes away. I don’t think that’s asking too much.”

“It isn’t,” Natasha agreed. “But if you want some company, we can talk about your options on the way.”

He stared at her and she had the sense of being weighed and assessed. “You both want to follow me to San Diego. And you’re sure _you_ aren’t being followed?”

“You’re on leave as far as SHIELD is concerned. As far as Clint and I…” Natasha trailed off and Clint picked up the thread of conversation. “What she’s being delicate about is that SHIELD didn’t want me there, but they didn’t want me to leave either. They don’t know what to do with me, so she gave Fury a line about needing to get out of the city for my health, and here we are.”

“Fury expects me to bring you back in,” Natasha told him. “That was our implicit understanding. I want to get you out if that’s what you want. I—we—want you to have a choice.”

“Why? And don’t give me ‘because Phil Coulson said so’ as a reason. You’re both risking a hell of a lot.”

“I’ll never work for SHIELD again,” Clint answered, picking at a splinter on the table. “Not in the same capacity, not in any situation where someone would have to trust me. There will be an investigation about Loki’s invasion. It’ll conclude that, brainwashed or not, I helped kill SHIELD agents and aided an enemy army. I will be given two alternatives: a quiet retirement, my silence and my pension, or a bullet to the head and a hole in the ground. I’d prefer to keep breathing, thanks, so from here, it’s retirement.”

“That explains you,” Steve admitted. “But what about you, Natasha?”

She sighed. “I never got an actual choice to be a Black Widow. I was a child. When I defected, I went to work for SHIELD because I knew I didn’t have the skills to operate as an actual person.” She held up a hand to forestall Clint’s inevitable argument with that, but Natasha knew herself better than anyone else by now and being a person was a carefully balanced set of choices much more challenging than being a Red Room operative had been. “And I knew I’d done some awful things and SHIELD seemed my best chance to start balancing the ledger. But once I was there…SHIELD isn’t entirely what it claims to be. Phil saw that too.”

Steve raised an eyebrow at her but when she didn’t elaborate further, he didn’t press. “I borrowed Dave’s laptop once,” he said. “Just wanted to see what SHIELD wouldn’t let me see. Who I was…what my image became after the ice. Do you know how many anti-immigrant, anti-gay, anti-women groups in this country use my image as a symbol of their ‘real America’? I spoke three languages before I even started school, because my neighbors didn’t use English at home.” He sounded angry and indescribably weary. “Right before the Chitauri invaded, the PR team at SHIELD sent me a list of interviews they wanted me to do, and safe topics I should stick to. What I learned, pretty quickly, is that whomever they think Captain America is, they don’t want Steve Rogers along with him.” He smiled then. It was not a look that boded well for SHIELD. “I want out. If you can help.”

***  
Later that night, Clint left the tent he and Natasha were sharing. She was deeply asleep, but even then, he was careful to leave one of her knives in reach. Nat only slept well when either she was armed or he was next to her, preferably both. She stirred a little bit and he murmured, “Gonna take a walk.” The tendon in her left wrist flexed against the ghosts of missing handcuffs, then relaxed. He ignored, in a habit of long practice, how much he wanted to hurt whomever had made a child, then a young woman, sleep in handcuffs, and ambled down the path where Steve Rogers had set up camp. He too was awake, smoking outside his truck. “Couldn’t sleep?” he asked, keeping his voice low.

Unsurprisingly, Rogers---Steve---shrugged. “Sometimes I can, sometimes…not.” Clint heard the tell-tale rustle of cigarettes in their package. “You smoke?”

“Probably shouldn’t,” Clint said, taking one from him and lighting it. “But I’m going to right now. I didn’t think you smoked.”

“They were in our ration kits,” Steve said unexpectedly. “I never could when I had asthma, but when I was with the Howlies…it was nice, around a fire. When you got nothing else to do.”

Clint had spent more than a few days doing “hurry up and wait” but as a sniper, hadn’t been able to smoke. “Man, I’ve been there. Can’t smoke, can’t leave, can’t do nothin’ but wait for the target to come out of the shadows.”

Steve quirked a smile in the mellow glow of the cigarette. “That how you met Natasha?” He shrugged. “My packet on her was almost entirely redacted, same as yours was. I figure I was lucky her name wasn’t blacked out too.”

Clint might have laughed about that---SHIELD was obsessed with compartmentalization to a sometimes ridiculous degree---except that it also said some uncomfortable things about how much (or how little) they’d trusted this man to lead a team without knowing much about the people he was leading. “There was a Red Notice out on her,” he said simply. “Kill order. Shoot on sight order to any SHIELD personnel. No questions asked, no additional authorization needed.”

“And?” Steve prompted gently.

“Budapest,” he responded. “I had her in my sights. Then I realized---shit, she was just a kid. Fifteen or sixteen. So I made a different call. Brought her in, offered her an honest choice. Put a call into Fury, asked him why he hadn’t told me I was hunting a _child,_ and told Coulson she wanted to defect. He was my handler then, and went to bat for the both of us.” He blew out some smoke and watched it rise, grey against the night sky. “Steve, what she said to you? There are people at SHIELD that she’s worked with for years who haven’t heard a tenth as much as she told you tonight. And the reason I’m telling you this is that her offer of help is genuine and you can trust it.”

“Seem a bit paranoid, do I?” Steve asked lightly.

Clint tapped the ash from his cigarette into a cup Steve held out. “Suspicious, more like, not that I blame you. You got dumped into a pretty epic pile of shit.” He eyed the other man, noting the lines of stress that were there if you cared to look closely. “Okay, so SHIELD isn’t for you. You have any thoughts as to what you would like to do?”

“Two weeks ago, I was fighting in World War II.” He shrugged. “I’d planned to go to back to school once the war was over.”

“You went to college?” Clint asked. That hadn’t been in anything he read.

“Mmmhmm. Art school, for a couple of semesters. Maybe I could do that again?”

Clint nodded. “Why not? If you don’t qualify for the GI Bill, who does?” He took another drag off the cigarette. “You thought about where you’d like to live?”

“I don’t think I can go back to Brooklyn. For one, I can’t afford to, for another…isn’t that exactly where SHIELD would look for me?”

“But you have back pay coming,” Clint protested. “Don’t you?”

“It’s tied up in ‘negotiations’ between the Army, SHIELD---as the successor agency to the SSR---and a law firm retained by Howard Stark. Howard apparently set up some kind of trust fund in case I was found.”

Clint let that last bit of information pass for the moment, especially given Steve and Tony’s thorny relationship. “Uh-huh. ‘Negotiations.’ That sounds…convenient.”

“Now who sounds suspicious?” Steve asked dryly. “The same thought had occurred to me. I won’t be getting access to that money so long as I’m independent of SHIELD, and the only money I have right now is the bonus SHIELD decided to pay the Avengers. It won’t last forever. So I need another plan.” The man grinned, a look that took some of the weariness off his face. “I’m new here. You have any ideas?”

Clint ground out the last of his cigarette on the asphalt and threw the butt in the trash. “Ask me when we stop in New Mexico. By then, Nat should have some ideas too.”


	4. Chapter 4

Chapter 4

Steve didn’t travel with Natasha and Clint when they left the Grand Canyon. For one, he needed some time to gather his thoughts and think about what he might do if he was able to retire, if was able to just de-mob the way he and Bucky should have been able to do all those years ago. And for another---he liked Natasha and Clint, had trusted them in battle, but he needed to be absolutely sure _they_ weren’t being followed as well. Last thing he needed or wanted was some SHIELD posse showing up at Jim’s home.

The music on the truck’s radio was low in the background, some jazz station out of NPR. It wasn’t the jazz from his time, not really, but he found that he liked it---similar enough to take the edge off the worst of his thoughts, new enough to remind him where he was. And so he let himself think of Bucky and Peggy for the first time. He knew Peggy was still alive, that she’d married a few years after his death, had a couple of kids even, but her marriage hadn’t survived past the mid-1950s and Peggy’s deepening involvement in what became SHIELD. He could call her, maybe, but did he even have the right after so long? She’d lived her life and it had been a full one, from what he could tell. And like Jim, she must be in her 90s now.

_Like me._

As for Bucky…he’d tried not to think of Bucky, because spending more than half his waking moments feeling as if the other man should still be beside him was neither sane nor healthy. But damn, Steve missed him. Missed the friendship, the easy camaraderie of _I see you I know you I understand._ There were other things too that Steve missed, feelings they’d never been able to put a name to, but that couldn’t be helped either. He’d tried to put Bucky in the same category of the other Howlies, almost all of whom were now dead, but found that he couldn’t quite manage it. After all, Bucky had been _alive_ three weeks and seventy years ago. So had the others, but there was only one Bucky.

Not for the first time, he wished Bucky could see this bright-edged, sharp future---Bucky had been the one who had dragged him to the Stark Expo, after all, and Steve thought he’d probably have loved to see the gadgets and all the new things people in this century used to communicate with each other. Or he might have hated it; Bucky had been amused by Howard Stark’s flying car but had muttered later that night that he hoped the damned thing never got made, _Stevie can you imagine with the shitty way people drive now?_

He tried (and failed again, but that was the way of things) to push Bucky out of his mind yet again and tried instead to focus on seeing Jim Morita, Jim who had invited him to come to California and see him. Dave had given him a few burner cellphones and Steve had gone to the rooftop to make the call. “Thought that was you, kid! Fighting an alien army---well, we never thought we’d see that, did we?” In Steve’s mind’s eye, he saw the younger Morita, heating up boiling water to sterilize his instruments while mortars landed all around them. He’d seemed utterly unflappable then.

Jim’s voice had softened. “Steve. How are you doing, really?”

Even then, Steve almost hadn’t been able to admit it. “Not well. “

Jim had snorted, the old rusty saw laugh that took Steve back to he and Falsworth, ribbing each other. “Now, that’s an understatement, I’m sure. Look, why don’t you ditch the fancy suit and come on out to California? We can talk.”

Jim’s granddaughter---her name was Stephanie, Steve was somewhat startled to find---called him for dinner in the background and then Alice, his daughter took the phone. “Captain Rogers?” she said. “I heard my dad invite you. Please come. We’d love to see you. He’s talked so much about you.”

“Your dad’s a good man, Alice. Thank you. I’ll be there.”

Now, five days out from NYC, Steve couldn’t help but wonder what would happen after SHIELD learned he wouldn’t be joining their ranks. He had a set of IDs---driver’s license, birth certificate---manufactured by SHIELD, but that was it. No job. Even his apartment, bugged and all, had been paid for by SHIELD. He knew how to be poor and struggling, could probably have taught a master class in it, but the rules were different here and now. 

***

Natasha had marked out the precise spot on the folded map he kept next to the driver’s seat. It almost wasn’t necessary; Steve had memorized the location of their next campsite as soon as she’d marked it on the map. “Don’t use the GPS on your phone or any of the navigational apps,” she’d cautioned just before they’d left the Grand Canyon. “GPS means satellites which means you can be tracked very easily.”

He’d held up one of Dave’s burner phones, something he’d been told was an old flip phone. “I don’t think that’s even an option.”

She grinned. “Probably not. But remember that for future reference.”

Steve would, of course---his memory had always been good before the serum, but after it? He couldn’t forget anything even if he wanted to. But now, as he passed Alamogordo heading west, he wondered if somehow, some part of his mind had also tracked the passage of his decades in the ice. It wasn’t a pleasant thought---he thought he’d slept through it, only to wake in that farce of a hospital room. But then there were the nightmares, of cold and ice and pressure that seemed to force him into nothing even as he tried to breathe against it.

He flinched as the shivering began---shivering in what he intellectually knew was desert heat. Steve pulled over to the side of the road, retrieved the blanket he’d bought from the Army-Navy surplus, and hunkered down in its folds. Eventually, the shivering would stop. Eventually. But not for a while yet.

Steve saw his face reflected in the rearview mirror—pale and haggard, eyes red-rimmed---and cursed under his breath. _Shell-shock. PTSD._ All the things Natasha had spoken about earlier. It brought back other echoes---of being sick all the time, a burden to first his mam, then to Bucky. Was he losing his mind, then? He remembered what Clint said, what Natasha had promised: _That’s not how we do things now._ And Clint had also said that Natasha’s offer of help was real.

Maybe it was time to trust someone. To accept the help he was being offered.

***

“Natasha,” Clint said as they drove to their next campsite, “what’s your plan for all this? What are you thinking?”

“He wants out,” she told him, eyes on the open road and blue desert sky above them. “We help him.”

“Well, yes,” Clint retorted with no heat. “But the serum? What do we do about that? It’s not a weapon he can put on a shelf or lock in a cabinet, Nat. And as long as he has it...” his voice trailed off. Not like he needed to tell _her_ what SHIELD was like when they thought they had the perfect weapon in their sights. 

“And he’s the only supersoldier.” She sighed. “I’ll talk to Paula about it when we reach San Diego. In the meantime, we have to make sure he understands what he’ll have to do. Evading SHIELD--even if Paula can help him with a new identity---isn’t going to be easy. He’s going to have to be stealthy.”

Clint recalled Steve’s comment about wearing tights. Steve Rogers was many things, he was coming to realize---brave, incredibly intelligent, and something of a troll when the mood took him---but he wasn’t stealthy. “That should be...interesting.”

“He caught us both off guard back at the Grand Canyon,” Natasha pointed out. “I didn’t expect that from Captain America. The historical accounts say the Howling Commandos ran several undercover missions, but you don’t expect that kind of ability from a man wearing his outfit.”

Clint had a thought then, about roles and icons and the men who made them. “Maybe that’s the problem, though. Everybody sees Captain America. Nobody sees Steve Rogers.”

Natasha nodded. “I’m sure you’re right. And now we have to make both of them disappear.”

***

Steve reached their campsite about half an hour later, just outside the ruins of what had been the town of Puente Antiguo. He recalled the name from Thor’s briefing packet—this had been the town where he and Loki had fought the first of their grudge-matches (as Fury had called them) and ended up leveling the town. SHIELD had relocated the survivors and now the town was vacant, rusting, crumbling ruins emerging from the desert sands.

Clint and Natasha were already setting up their tent. “So why this place?” Steve asked as he parked his truck.

From Natasha’s quick glance, he gathered that he looked a sight, and ran his hand through his hair, probably making it worse. “Stars look nice out here. No light pollution.”

“And?” Steve asked.

“And there’s nobody for a hundred miles in any direction. Which for what we need to discuss…” Natasha shrugged. “Let’s say we won’t attract any attention.”

“SHIELD doesn’t watch this place?” Steve inquired.

“Not anymore, no,” Clint answered. “After Thor and his brother---” he almost spat the last word--- “had their pissing contest, SHIELD paid a bunch of money to move the inhabitants somewhere else, paid them more money to shut up about the whole thing and then promptly set up enough technology to block even the most sophisticated surveillance and marooned some researchers here.” He paused. “Then the Chitauri invaded. And even the level 4 fuckups who got stuck here got pulled back to the Triskelion for threat analysis and so on. So while it all looks scary, SHIELD has other things to do besides monitor this place right now.” He smiled but there was something a little forced about it. Then it vanished and it was back to his usual easy-going manner. “When it comes down to it, there’s only about five places on this earth that are both as empty as this place is and as protected. And a couple of those are covered in ice.”

Steve made himself chuckle, the memory of the pressure of the ice only too close. “Good call.”

“So let’s eat first,” Clint went on, “and then we can discuss logistics.”

Steve raised his eyebrows. “Logistics?”

Natasha started pulling food out of an ice cooler in the back of their station wagon; Steve went to help her. “You can’t disappear like you’re probably thinking you can. You _will_ be spotted. You _will_ be noticed. Hell, if that college student had been a little more sure of herself? She’d have realized immediately who you were.” She flashed a dry smile at him. “Just your luck she was a pre-med major.”

“So what do I do?” Steve asked. “I can’t go around as me, under my real name either.”

“Way I see it,” Clint said, “we have to do two things. We have to make you disappear in such a way that SHIELD isn’t monitoring you and we have to make it so you can do what you want to do after the fact.” He handed a tall sandwich to Steve and began working on another one. “Natasha probably has ideas as to the first, and I’ve got some as to the second. So, art school?”

“Art school. Can I…do that? I’ve got a high school diploma from 1935 and a baptismal record instead of a birth certificate because I was born at home,” Steve answered. “None of which I can actually show to anyone because nobody would believe it.” He remembered that particular conversation with one of SHIELD’s liaisons vividly (“We’re just here to help you, Captain Rogers,” said in a way that had set off almost all of Steve’s alarms) and it was probably no coincidence that the same liaison had balked at returning what remained of Steve’s property (dog tags, Peggy’s compass) from the _Valkyrie_ because he needed to “learn to live in this century.”

Natasha had made herself a salad alongside a sandwich. “Starting at the beginning, here---the IDs SHIELD gave you won’t work. For one, they were given to you by SHIELD, and the more you use them, the easier it is for them to find you. So you’ll need new ones, and as it happens? I know a guy---a gal, actually---in San Diego who can help. So while you’re visiting Jim Morita, I’ll go talk to Paula.”

Clint eyed her. “She shot you last time.”

“She tried to shoot me last time. She missed,” Natasha interjected. “Now she owes me and I intend to collect.”

Clint rolled his eyes briefly. “Paula’s the best in her business. If you can avoid being used for target practice.” He made another sandwich---ham and swiss on rye, this time---and handed it to Steve. “Next thing is, where do you want to live?”

Steve considered. He’d ambled up and down the New York city streets, detoured a time or five into Brooklyn itself before the sheer newness of everything broke him in a way that nothing else had. He’d stopped at a few coffee shops, even got the number of a cute waitress at a diner (but hadn’t called her.) And none of it—save the subway---was familiar to him anymore. “Not the city,” he said, uncomfortable under Natasha’s regard. He wondered what she saw. “If I’m going to be someone else,” he went on, “then I need to be somewhere else.”

“That’s good thinking,” Clint responded. “And so, here’s one possible way we can get you out.” He cut his sandwich in half. “You tell Nick Fury you’re not going to join SHIELD. And you leave. Walk away.”

“Just like that?” Steve asked dryly. “You think he’d… just let me go?”

“You’re not a prisoner. But it won’t be that easy, no,” Natasha interjected. “He’ll pull out all the stops. Your accounts—the ones that SHIELD has control of---will be frozen outright. If SHIELD doesn’t have control over your bank accounts, they’ll be monitored closely. You’ll have case agents assigned to you, trying to figure out where you went and what you’re doing.”

Clint handed Steve a beer and opened his own. “She speaks from a certain amount of experience.”

Steve raised his eyebrows. “You disappeared too?”

“I was a sixteen year old who couldn’t have found normal on a map with a flashlight,” Natasha said dryly. “I wasn’t really serious about disappearing, though. I wanted to see Fury’s reaction, to see if I _could._ To see what he would do to me if I did.” She shrugged. “That won’t be your problem. But Rogers---Steve” and she gave him a measured, piercing look--- “don’t underestimate how hard it’s going to be to disappear. You’ll have to lay low for at least a year, maybe more, before SHIELD gets the idea that you’re serious. They’ll dial back the surveillance attempts eventually, or---if you’re very lucky---eliminate them outright, once they realize there’s nothing to see and that you aren’t going out of your way to be…obvious, but---”

“Which is where I come in,” Clint said. “I have a farm.”

Steve blinked. “That’s…probably the last thing I expected you to say.”

“It’s off the books,” Clint told him. “Far off the books. A safe place that I bought when I first joined SHIELD, and whose ownership is buried under a few different corporations by now. And it’s not a huge farm, mind. I raise barley and corn there, have a few chickens for the eggs and a horse that probably knows more about the farm than I do. But it needs managing and I haven’t been able to be there as much as I’d like. And,” he said lightly, as if he hadn’t just tossed Steve a lifeboat, “it’s in the middle of Bumfuck, Iowa. Nearest neighbors are miles away. I can guarantee you that nobody is going to look for you there.” He paused. “Or, if you don’t want to walk away, you could fake your death, and still come to the farm. But after your…”

“Defrosting?” Steve asked, reeling a bit but feeling---for the first time---some kind of ease in speaking of his years in the ice. “I don’t mind the term. It’s what SHIELD called it.”

“Yeah, but let’s not use them as a meter for normal, okay?” Clint drank some more of his beer. “I’m guessing---and if I figured it out, SHIELD probably already did too---that you’re more than a little difficult to kill. At least in such a way that you stay dead.”

There was something….refreshing and altogether familiar about Clint’s blunt honesty. For a moment, the scene wavered and it was (Bucky, standing over a map drawn in the dirt, saying, _“For Christ’s sake, Captain, this isn’t a place you need to go charging into head first. This is Hydra. You got a team, use it!”_ ) then Steve blinked again and the moment passed. “You’re…probably not wrong there.”

***

Natasha found Clint smoking the last in his pack of cigarettes. She’d get on him about that later--- addictions of any kind were bad in their line of work, especially the ones that could kill you---but she couldn’t begrudge him it now. “So, your thoughts?” she signed, standing next to him and noticing that his hearing aids were out. Which was fine, in her estimation---there wasn’t really much that could surprise her, awake or asleep.

Clint played dumb, but she’d realized fairly early on that he wasn’t dumb, was in fact smarter than most people she knew, especially when it came to people. “Phil wasn’t wrong,” he finally signed, putting out his cigarette to free both hands. “Steve’s gone through a lot and SHIELD hasn’t even really attempted to help him out. Not where it counts, anyway. How did Fury not see how messed up he is?”

The question was rhetorical, so she didn’t answer it. “Do you think we can actually help him?”

“Phil thought we could,” Clint answered. “I thought he was nuts a time or ninety, but I never knew him to be wrong.”

Natasha almost smiled. It had been Phil, after all, who had made the arrangements to ex-fil her out of Budapest all those years ago. When, much later, she’d asked him why, Phil had merely smiled that non-smile of his and said, “I never knew Clint to be wrong. Crazy, maybe, but never wrong.”

There was a rustle from the other tent and Steve emerged, looking as if he’d run a marathon. Nightmares, Natasha deduced. “I’m…I didn’t know anyone else was up.”

“There’s no reason you would have heard us,” she replied. “Are you all right?”

Clint tapped his ear and went back inside their tent to put his hearing aids back in. Steve watched him but she could tell he really wasn’t seeing either of them. The Red Room had taken away her ability to dream--- or so she’d thought, until her own nightmares began. “I…I honestly don’t know,” Steve said. He was shivering, she noticed, and while it was cool here at night, it wasn’t cold.

“It’s a bit chilly tonight,” she told him, poking at the banked fire and adding some more fuel to it.

“I’m not cold,” Steve insisted, though his shivering hadn’t stopped.

“Well, I am,” she said briskly. “Did I tell you what happened when Clint convinced me to defect?”

Steve shook his head. “No, I don’t think you did. That was all missing from your file too.”

Natasha rolled her eyes. “Of course it was. Leave it to SHIELD to give you a dossier on all of us but then leave most of the important parts out.”

“I saw a few people at SHIELD when Clint brought me here,” Natasha went on, not looking at Steve, not watching his reaction to what she said, trying to give him privacy to process what she was about to tell him. “Nothing much worked. They tried, SHIELD did, but it turns out that people who can successfully deprogram a 16 year old brainwashed assassin are fairly thin on the ground. Then they brought in this woman. She had to be in her seventies then, but she was a presence. And she was a legend in the Red Room, the only SHIELD agent to successfully evade multiple assassination attempts by both the Red Room and the KGB.” She grinned a little, remembering. “I had thought she would be weak and unskilled, but she had me on the mat in five minutes.”

She had the sense that Steve’s breathing was calming, that his shivering was beginning to stop. “Who was she?” he asked.

“Margaret Carter, retired director of SHIELD,” Natasha replied. “I underestimated her, badly, but in the end, only she was able to help me. I was…taken by the Red Room as a child. I didn’t know how to be a person, or anything but a killer. And I don’t mean to imply that Margaret Carter ran a one-woman charm offensive and somehow broke life-long conditioning, but…what she did do was far more insidious.” At Steve’s inquiring look, she grinned. “She trusted me. It was a test of wills and I’m not sure where or how she learned how to handle me so well, but… at the end of it, I was a good bit more than I’d been when Clint found me in Budapest.”

She folded her hands and gazed at the flickering fire. “So when I tell you that I know what it’s like, _exactly what it’s like_ , to have to rebuild yourself when everything you know or thought you knew is gone, I do. And I want to help you. Will you let me?”

“I would have before you told me,” Steve told her, “but yes, I will.”


	5. Chapter 5

Chapter 5

 

They reached San Diego on a Friday morning. Steve, who had been to the city once during his USO stint, couldn’t believe how much it had changed. Cities where there had been scrub land, freeways that cut across places that used to be dairy farms and whole shopping centers in places that had been river valleys. “Changed much?” Clint asked once they reached the more rural town where Jim Morita lived. Natasha had taken their car to her meeting with Paula at a local taco shop, which left Clint and Steve.

Clint had offered to drive and Steve---more rattled than he wanted to admit by the sheer speed of the freeway traffic---had agreed. “Everything has changed,” Steve answered. “I wasn’t here long, not enough to really know my way around but almost nothing is familiar.” He remembered the view outside the USO tour bus, Polly and Marilyn and Lucy and Jane, their faces pressed to the window in excitement and glee. He hadn’t even tried to find out what had happened to them, and it had been Polly who had seen him drawing one endless sketch of Bucky after another and deduced his feelings for Bucky went beyond friendship. She hadn’t said a thing, but from then on, had told the other girls that he had a girl back home he was waiting for.

_Maybe I should look her up,_ he mused. _If only to say thank you, while there’s still time. If there’s still time._

“Man, I hadn’t even thought about that,” Clint said, breaking into his thoughts. “Like, I went to basic and when I came back, things were different but my home was still my home. But what you went through… you’ve got some serious whiplash, I’m guessing.”

That brought an unwilling laugh, and Steve felt the first smile he’d felt in days. “That’s one way to put it.”

***

Jim Morita’s house was located in a neighborhood made up of what Clint told him was post-WW II construction, homes built for the returning GIs. It wasn’t a large house, but the yard was manicured with a small garden along side. Steve remembered the citrus farm Jim’s family had once owned, and been forced to leave when they were interned at Manzanar, and hoped that this home was a sign that Jim’s family had regained at least some of their prosperity.

“I’ll go park the car,” Clint said. “And I’ll meet you inside. That’s his house, right? 4421?”

Steve nodded. “Thanks, Clint.”

Stephanie Morita, it turned out, had seen him coming, and had opened the door before he even made it up the sidewalk. “Steve? I’m Stephanie. Grandpa’s told me so much about you.”

Steve smiled at his namesake—it was impossible not to smile at her, even as he acknowledged that in terms of lived years, Stephanie was now closer to his age than her grandfather was. “Thank you. It’s nice to be here.”

He noticed that Stephanie removed her shoes when she entered the home; he did as well, placing them by the door. The home had the slightly cluttered feel of a place where people have lived and loved thoroughly. It wasn’t a museum or a statement; there were no computerized voices monitoring everything. An ornate altar---Shinto or Buddhist, he didn’t know and couldn’t tell---nestled in a corner with a picture of a young man in a military uniform ( _Jim’s son?_ Steve wondered but didn’t look too closely, recognizing the altar as a sacred space and not wanting to intrude,) and some older pictures of people who must have been Jim’s own parents. There were pictures on the walls---family, mostly, including a few of a young man who looked very much like Jim Morita standing in front of a large school, the Manhattan skyline behind him. “Grandpa will be out here soon,” Stephanie was saying. “Would you like some water?”

“Yes, please,” he told her. The morning clouds were burning off and it was beginning to warm up some.

“We’re out of ice,” she called from the kitchen. “I hope you don’t mind.”

“No,” Steve answered, “That’s…not a problem at all.”

***

Stephanie left a few moments later; she was in medical school at UCSD and had a lab she couldn’t miss. Steve found himself staring at the pictures on the walls, wondering when they’d been taken, but one picture in particular stopped his breath. A greying Gabe Jones, arm in arm with a grinning Jim Morita, and a woman who could only be Peggy at Capitol Hill---Peggy with a wide streak of silver in her hair, Peggy, who he had last seen two weeks and seventy years ago. There was no date on the photo, no way to tell how long ago it had been taken, but the gulf of years, of all he had missed... _God. Peggy. Gabe, who he’d missed by months. Jim, who might not be around for much longer._

A voice spoke from the hallway. “Hiya, Ace,” Jim said. “How are you doing?”

The hallway was slightly shadowed; for a moment, Steve only saw Jim Morita as he had been, but then the moment shifted and there was his old friend, silver-haired and wizened and using a walker, but still so very much the same. If Steve’s voice was unsteady when he spoke,, Jim would never mention it. “I…it’s good to see you, pal.”

“Mind if we sit outside for a bit? It’s a lovely day outside,” Jim asked. “Got to get some sun into these old bones anyway. Alice is out getting groceries for lunch but there’s some chips and guacamole I made this morning in the refrigerator.” He grinned. “And some beer, but we can wait on that if you want.”

Steve shrugged. “The beer won’t affect me, but if you want…”

“I’m 95,” Jim said. “And that means I don’t give a hoot what anybody thinks if I drink with an old friend.”

He was surprised to see a device much like the one Natasha had used at the Grand Canyon in Jim’s hand as they took their seats outside. Jim merely shrugged. “Gabe’s grandson got it for me---the kid’s at the Academy now, and got a hold of a spare one of these devices. Figured you might want to make sure our conversation is private.”

“I do, thanks,” Steve answered, astonished all over again at the scope of what he’d missed out on. “Do the Howlies have anyone else at SHIELD?”

“Well, Peggy’s great-niece is there,” Jim said. “Figures her last name is so common nobody would mark her as Peggy’s relation but I don’t guess she’s fooling anyone. Jacques Dernier’s granddaughter works for the DGSE now, and we’ve got more than the usual set of doctors and lawyers in our ranks too.” He took a long pull of his beer. “But that’s not what you want to talk about, is it?”

“No, I do…I want to hear how your lives” _…went on without me…_ he almost said, but didn’t, “I want to hear all about your families. I’ve missed out on so much.”

Jim’s lined face softened. “Then I’ll tell you. But I’ve been hearing things from some of my sources about you and SHIELD. You joining up with them?”

“No. I’m not joining SHIELD,” Steve said. It was the first time he’d admitted it to anyone but Clint and Natasha and the freedom was…heartening. “But I know they won’t let me simply disappear either.”

Jim leaned back in his chair and gave him a look very much reminiscent of a younger Jim Morita, casting a gimlet eye on Dernier’s shenanigans. “I kept an eye on SHIELD from Congress for a good many years, kid. And I don’t blame you. And as far as them letting you go…you just have to find the right lever. Given the right one, you could move a planet. What do you think they want with you?”

Steve spread his hands. “I don’t know, exactly. But I don’t want to fight, or be anyone’s dancing monkey, not ever again. Or a lab rat.”

“All very reasonable. So, you have to figure out how to make sure they can’t make you do any of these things. Once you have that, I figure you’re golden. What are you going to do with your freedom, eh?”

“Art school,” Steve told him. “It was what I did before the war and it’s something Captain America never did.”

“Captain America was damned good at punching Nazis,” Jim agreed, “but it’s time for Steve Rogers to have a life.” His dark eyes glimmered a bit. “Did you call Peggy?”

“No,” Steve answered. “I had my hand on the phone so many times, but I…”

“I get it,” Jim said, “but…Steve, you got to know she never forgot you. None of us did. So call her, will ya?”

“I’ll think about it,” Steve promised, swallowing around the persistent ache of Peggy and all that she’d meant or could have meant to him. “But I want to hear about your life. What did you get into after the war?”

“I came back to Fresno,” Jim began. “My folks got released from the camps, and couldn’t rebuild what they’d lost, so they went into the nursery business with another family from the camps. Their oldest daughter became my wife six months to the day after the war ended. Then I met up with Gabe Jones and his bride and he convinced me I ought to go back to school, seeing as how I’d been so good patching you guys up. So I did that while Grace---my wife---was pregnant with our oldest. Worked as a doctor for about ten years, then Grace convinced me to run for office. Gabe had already served his first term and both of us were in Congress the same time, and for the same amount of years. Those were some trying times, but…as Gabe said, if we could survive Hydra, we could survive anything.”

“Boy, that’s amazing,” Steve marveled, and it was. It had always rankled him that Jim and Gabe and Peggy never got the credit they deserved as members of the Howlies. “What about the others?”

“Dugan became a schoolteacher of English and fathered a bunch of kids. Didn’t really see him much outside of the reunions. Dernier eventually ran the DGSE for a time, and Falsworth kept on working for MI-6. Went on a few missions with Carter too before she ran SHIELD full time.” He shrugs. “As for me, I had four children—lost my eldest, Aaron, in Vietnam, but Lisa, Alice, and Jamie have had good lives and what more could I ask for?” Jim studied him. “You have friends now? People who will look out for you?”

He thought of Natasha and Clint. They had fought together once, saved the world, but they were his friends now, his team, as surely as the Howlies had been. “Yeah, I do.”

***

Clint came back around noon. “Sorry I’m late. I did some surveillance, making sure we weren’t followed. Near as I can tell, we’re still fine. Natasha says she’s making progress with Paula too.”

Jim smiled. “I’m glad you’re looking out for this one, Hawkeye. We’re going to have lunch soon---will you join us?”

“It’s Clint,” he answered, “and I never turn down food. Thank you.”

As they ate, they exchanged old stories Steve had made himself forget because remembering hurt too much. “And then this one shows up in this ridiculous costume and says, ‘I’m Captain America,’ “ Jim said, laughing. “I thought I was hallucinating.”

“I’d just come off a show when I learned what happened to the 107th,” Steve explained, flushing slightly. “Didn’t have too much time to change.”

Clint laughed. “Holy hell. Now, that’s an image I’ll never forget. History books make that sound like a well-planned attack.”

“Not really,” Steve admitted, not at all surprised the history books had gotten that wrong too. “My friend had been captured, along with the rest of his unit. And nobody was coming to rescue them.”

“We were too far behind enemy lines,” Jim put in. “And we’d been captured by Hydra. I looked up the reports years later. The generals figured they’d lose more men than they’d save trying to get to us, so they’d just…written us off. Except for this one,” and he jerked his thumb at Steve, “Peggy Carter, and Howard Stark.”

Clint leaned back in his chair. “Now, Peggy Carter, I can see—I met the woman when she still ran SHIELD and she was a force of nature. But how did Howard Stark get involved?”

Steve shrugged. “Someone had to fly the plane. I couldn’t ask a military pilot to do it, not on my say-so, and Howard was the best civilian pilot around.”

“And so you rescued them, destroyed the base, and hiked back thirty plus miles to your camp?” Clint asked. “And didn’t lose anyone else? Steve, anyone ever tell you that plan shouldn’t have worked?”

“I found that out during the debriefing afterwards. We got…insanely lucky. Kreichsberg—the prison camp---wasn’t just a prison camp. It was Hydra’s main research facility in that area. Taking it out temporarily crippled their ability to recapture us, but I didn’t know that then,” Steve said. He drank the last of his beer. “It didn’t matter, though. I would still have gone if I’d known what I was facing.”

“Yeah,” Clint said softly. “I guess you would. Did I tell you about the time Phil took out some robbers with a bag of flour?”

***

Eventually, Jim’s energy began to flag and his daughter Alice—who’d joined them for lunch as well---convinced him it was time for his nap. “I’m sorry, but I just don’t have that energy like I used to,” Jim said around a yawn. He peered up at Steve. “Now, you don’t have to tell me exactly what you’ll be doing once you sort all this out, but I’d appreciate a postcard with your address so we can keep in touch.”

Steve looked at Clint askance. The farmhouse wouldn’t stay secret long if he handed out its actual address. “We’ll figure out something,” Clint answered the question Steve hadn’t asked. “Don’t worry. You won’t be totally cut off from the outside world. You’ll just have to be careful. But it’s doable.”

Steve nodded. “All right, then. Thank you for inviting me, Jim, it’s been a real pleasure.”

When he held out his hand for a handshake, he was surprised to find Jim pulling him into a hug. “You stay safe now, Ace. And live your life. It’s what we all would want.”

Steve blinked several times and oh _there_ were the tears. He thought he’d forgotten how. “Thanks, Jim. I’ll be in touch.”

There was a buzzing sound from Clint’s phone. He glanced at the screen. “It’s Natasha. She’s ready for us.”

***

They met up with Natasha at the hotel room she and Clint had rented. Almost apologetically, she admitted that she’d also booked him into the same room. “Sometimes it helps the nightmares if you know someone else is keeping watch,” she told him, and Steve felt a weight that he hadn’t known he’d been carrying lift slightly. Someone else knew, and understood. 

“How did your visit with Jim Morita go?” she asked when Clint ducked out to get some ice for their sodas.

“He’s…doing better than I expected. Still sharp as a tack.”

“I’m not surprised,” Natasha said dryly. “Time was, the mention of his name at SHIELD used to send wise men scurrying for cover. Never could understand it myself, but then honesty tends to be a huge threat when you’re not honest yourself.”

At Steve’s inquiring look, she went on. “I met him once, just before he left Congress. What people must have thought, seeing him and Peggy Carter together…”

Steve could well imagine exactly what they’d thought. Jim and Gabe had been on the Congressional committee that oversaw SHIELD at the same time Peggy had been the director, yet he and Gabe and Peggy had managed to keep a decades’ long friendship despite it all. “If you have stories of them, I’d love to hear them sometime.”

Her green eyes twinkled. “I’ve got a few. I can’t say I was there for all of them but they’re legends on the Hill.” She crossed her legs underneath her. “Are you all right? You seem…lighter.”

Steve gazed at her, the slight figure in pajamas and a t-shirt, and thought how someone could mistake her for literally anyone---a ballerina, a dancer, a teacher, a lawyer---except for what she was, except for what she chose to reveal. “You know, I never did introduce myself to you,” he said, and held out his hand. “Steve Rogers.”

“Not for long,” she told him with a sphinx’s smile. “But I’m Natasha Romanoff. Nice to meet you.”

***

The motel room had a small end table; Natasha placed two folders on it and turned on the device she’d used at the Grand Canyon, then turned the TV on low. Clint walked in with sodas and ice just as she finished.

“Okay, are we ready?” she asked. “Steve, your name is James Stephen Grant,” Natasha said, laying out the pieces of identification on the table. “Good choice in names, by the way---something not you, but something you can remember easily. Your date of birth is July 4, 1984. You’re a veteran who served honorably in Iraq and Afghanistan before being discharged. You’re now attending school via the GI Bill, majoring in Art with a minor in History.”

Steve examined the pieces of identification---he was far from an expert but they seemed real in a way he couldn’t quantify. “Paula’s good,” Natasha went on. “Very good. The VA now has a record of you, as does the IRS. Good for you. You’ve been a regular taxpayer since you were eighteen years old.” She held up a rectangular piece of plastic with a small metallic chip embedded in it. “To activate all of these, you simply go to any ATM and make a withdrawal. Wait 24 hours and then you’re officially James Stephen Grant, Captain, retired.”

She gestured to the other folder on the table. “These are your recent medical records,” she told him.

“But I haven’t seen a doctor since right before the Chitauri invaded,” Steve protested.

“They’ve been altered,” Clint interjected. “Isn’t that right?”

“Mmhmm. A VA doctor affiliated with SHIELD---who, not coincidentally, owes Paula a rather large debt for saving his life in Bahrain a few years back---just did a series of lab tests on you. All very hush-hush---the samples were even destroyed!---but the serum is degrading. Within a few weeks, you won’t be a super-soldier any longer, and all the traces of it in your blood will disappear. Such a shame.”

“Jim’s lever,” Steve muttered in sheer astonishment. “You found the lever that can make SHIELD leave me alone.”

Natasha nodded. “Put bluntly, SHIELD won’t have any use for you if you can’t be Captain America. Now, the doctor has told them, and these records will back it up, that you’re still healthy, but the serum itself is disappearing.” Her eyes, sharp and assessing, pinned him again. “This will only work if you stay off the battlefield, off the radar. Meaning, you see a robbery in progress? You call the police. You work on a roof? You use a safety harness. Don’t take any risks, and lay low. You do one thing that’s not normal, and this whole cover is blown. Because SHIELD will be watching, waiting for _anything_ that’s out of the ordinary.”

Steve glanced at the identification spread out on the table, the pieces that meant a new life, and nodded. Erskine’s words rose in a persistent echo. _Not a good soldier, but a good man._ Would a good man just stand by and watch? “Thank you for the work you did on this. But if I see something...Natasha, I’m not going to be able to just let people get hurt, not when I could help.”

Natasha sighed. “Steve. There’s a real risk of you being taken into SHIELD’s protective custody---permanently---if you make a name for yourself outside their aegis. The Avengers _scared_ the World Security Council. The only thing that’s kept all of us out from SHIELD’s custody is Nick Fury’s promise to them that he has us ‘under control.’”

Clint sighed. “Breaking into Fury’s files again, Nat?” he interjected.

Natasha grinned with a certain malicious glee. ”If he didn’t want them read, he should have made it harder for me to get into his computer.” She breathed out, sobering. ”To continue...if you _must_ act… do it in such a way that it can’t be traced back to you. And don’t tell me about it.”

“What she doesn’t know, she can’t be made to tell,” Clint supplied cheerfully. “Relax, pal---nobody is saying to take up knitting. Just… be very careful about when and where you decide to act.”

“I already know how to knit,” Steve said mildly. “Thank you, Natasha. James Grant, at your service.”

“Don’t thank me yet,” Natasha answered with a smile. “We each have a condition. Mine is that you attend therapy. Paula’s contact at the VA gave me a list of some very good psychiatrists who are willing to consult with you via an online service.”

_Online?_ Steve wondered. He could only imagine what Dave would say about that. “Is that… safe?”

“Generally, no. But we’ll make sure it is for you,” Natasha said with the satisfied air of the cat who ate the canary.

“My condition,” Clint put in, “is that you get a pet of some kind, a dog or a cat. Something that needs you every day and forces you to get out of bed in the morning. You’ve been dealt a shitty hand pretty much since you woke up here, and you know what? A cat or dog doesn’t care who you are or who you were.” He handed Steve a set of keys. “This is a set of keys to my farm. Only two people in the entire world have a set—-you, me, Natasha. Keep our home safe, Steve. Take care of the place.”

_Shine my shoes, sweep the floors,_ Steve heard. It had been almost a century and he couldn’t keep living there. “Yeah, I…I think I can do that."


	6. Epilogue

**Three Years Later**

James Stephen Grant is a thirty something veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts. He’s an art student at the local university and takes online classes and does his therapy online because crowds unnerve him. He’s achieving moderate, mostly local, success with his paintings and in the main, lives the quiet life of a full time student. He lives on a farm owned by his cousin and coordinates the harvesting of rye, corn, and barley when it’s time, and rides a horse, a gentle mare named Fern, each day. He has an orange cat named Tulip and a dog named Lucky who rides alongside him and runs with him on the days when he feels the walls closing in.

That’s the story.

(Crime on campus and in the neighboring town has dropped a moderate degree in the last three years. Local police can’t explain why, but are all too eager to claim credit. That’s also the story.) 

James Stephen Grant also has a drawer full of charged burner phones, a ridiculous ease with most kinds of weaponry, and would no doubt win the Frisbee championship at his university if he ever showed up on campus. It’s a quiet life, but James Stephen Grant is not his real name, merely the second skin he lives under that protects him from all that he used to be. He still thinks of himself as Steve.

He gets calls sometimes from Dave, and postcards and short letters from Jim Morita, via a secure drop that Natasha had set up right after his arrival. He’s as connected to his old life as he wants to be and most nights, gets six hours of sleep before the nightmares come. Though even those are beginning to lessen after years of weekly therapy and a lot of work. It’s a quiet life, a content life, and while this isn’t the life Steve ever saw himself living, it’s a good one and he has no complaints. 

One night, three years after his arrival at the farm in Iowa, the doorbell rings. Steve tenses immediately, capping his tube of paint and setting the palette somewhere out of the way. It’s too late for deliveries, the neighbors—such as they are---are about five or six miles down the road. So nobody should be on his doorstep at all, unless it’s either an emergency or something worse. Lucky, sound asleep next to him, isn’t alarmed, so he figures it’s probably someone the dog knows. 

Still, he knows where all the weapons are stored-- the throwing knife under the cushions, the unloaded revolver in the hall tree by the front door, the ammunition in the flour container in the kitchen, the shield---the only thing he kept from his old life---within easy reach. And if Steve can’t get to any of those? Peggy Carter taught him how to fight. He doesn’t underestimate the harm the lamp on the carved end table could do, or---in a pinch--- the end table itself.

A second knock follows, in a pattern of Morse code. _S-O-S_ it says and he relaxes a bit, knowing it’s either Natasha or Clint. He opens the door to find four people---Natasha, Clint, a good looking African-American man, and a man dressed all in black with a face shadowed by the hood of his sweatshirt. “Can we come in?” she asks. “Everyone we know is trying to kill us.”

“Yeah, of course,” Steve says, thinking of the very long list of people who might want either of them dead. As far as the other two men? He shrugs. If they’re with Natasha and Clint, they’re friends and allies. “Come in. I can get some coffee brewing.”

The man wearing a sweatshirt has a hunted, harried look; his eyes---greyish blue---dart back and forth nervously in the shadows of his hood. Steve goes to draw the blinds---blackout curtains, because Clint had prepped the farmhouse well---and turns most of the lights off. If someone is coming for all of them, he won’t make it easy. “What’s going on?” he asks.

“Hydra. It’s alive, and infesting SHIELD,” Natasha says. “Fury is dead, Steve, and Project Insight—-in a few days, they’re going to kill 20 million people.”

“SHIELD...is _Hydra?”_ Steve asks slowly, rocked with horror---he’d died to destroy them and here they were, _again. Goddamned squid Nazis._ A whole catalogue of everyday mundane horrors, the things SHIELD had done or said or wanted him to do in the days following his awakening---things he’d talked about at length in therapy--suddenly make sense now that he has the context. “I...wish I could say I was totally surprised.”

“Yeah, I don’t guess you would be,” the unidentified man says as he pulls down the hood of his sweatshirt. And for the second time in his life, Steve feels as if he’s drowning, as if his heart is stopping, as if he can finally now see in color. _You were dead. I saw you fall._

“Bucky?” Steve finally manages, reaching out to touch the man’s sleeve, not at all convinced that Bucky won’t disappear like he always had in the worst of his nightmares. When he finds the smooth rigidity of a metal arm under the sweatshirt sleeve--- _Bucky never had that before_ \--- Steve breathes out, trying to focus. He wants to gather the other man closer, but Hydra...infesting SHIELD...

The man smiles a tired, weary smile, running a metal hand---a metal hand!—through his loosened hair. “Hey Stevie, feel like saving the world again?” 

Steve finds a smile wanting to emerge and ignores the surprised looks and Natasha’s knowing glance. And Bucky pulls him closer and Steve feels something deep in his spine uncurl and it’s--- _oh, _now _I’m alive._ Even the scent of him wasn’t all that changed, which---”You need a bath,” Steve blurts, then feels his face flush.__

__“Yeah,” Bucky says, all Brooklyn sass in that tone. “Guess I do. Had a few more pressing things to take care of just now.” He pulls back a moment, blue-grey eyes sharp but kind too and heavy with things Steve can’t even begin to name. “ _James_ , is it now?”_ _

__Steve rubbed the back of his neck, feeling his ears heat up. “Well, I wasn’t going to forget it, now was I?”_ _

__“I hate to interrupt this reunion,” Natasha says dryly, “but Steve---remember when I told you to stay off the radar? I obviously didn’t know what I was talking about.”_ _

__The African-American man sitting on his couch narrows his eyes. “Man, you’re not—-”_ _

__Steve waves that off. “I was, then I decided not to be. Steve Rogers, nice to meet you. And you are?”_ _

__“Sam Wilson,” the man answers._ _

__“And you helped them?” Steve asks._ _

__“Yep,” Sam says. “Didn’t see how I could do much else.”_ _

__“So what happened?” Steve asks as the coffee begins to percolate._ _

__The story goes pretty quickly from there---how Tony, who had left one last surprise in SHIELD’s servers, saw something deeply concerning buried in an operations plan for their use of his engine designs; how he’d contacted Natasha just before she and Clint had been dispatched to the Lemurian Star (“Special mission for Fury,” Clint put in, “I was rubber stamping paperwork in Personnel until he recalled me”); how Bucky had broken his conditioning and found his way to the VA where he met Sam and where Natasha---who had decrypted the thumb drive Fury gave her just before he was killed---learned of Project Insight and the identity of the Winter Soldier and was able to track him down before Hydra did. And from there, they’d taken one of Tony’s quinjets and fled to this farm in Iowa, because it was still the last place on earth anybody would look. Because it was still safe._ _

__Steve hands each of them a cup of coffee, trying not to stare at Bucky but unable to do much else. “So,” he says, forcing his mind back to the essentials, “what’s the plan?”_ _

__“Mayhem, chaos, blowing up three helicarriers out of the sky with Tony’s targeting blades, destroying some Nazis again, saving the world,” Clint says cheerfully. “Just a usual Saturday afternoon.”_ _

__“Of course,” Steve replies, glancing around at his team, his family. “When do we start?”_ _

__

__THE END_ _


End file.
